In Brain Pickings, Maria Popova explores Umberto Eco’s book on the greatest maps of imaginary places and why they appeal to us.

Eco writes in the introduction: Legendary lands and places are of various kinds and have only one characteristic in common: whether they depend on ancient legends whose origins are lost in the mists of time or whether they are an effect of a modern invention, they have created flows of belief. The reality of these illusions is the subject of this book.

The book is “an illustrated voyage into history’s greatest imaginary places, with all their fanciful inhabitants and odd customs, on scales as large as the mythic continent Atlantis and as small as the fictional location of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment. A dynamic tour guide for the human imagination…”

These photographers may have never known the significance of the pictures they took, Jake Heppner tells us at Distractify, “or that millions would be marveling at them in the future. From thousands of images, I chose these to give us a rare and fascinating look at how different (and similar) life used to be.”A beach official measures bathing suits to ensure they aren’t too short (1920s)

This bizarre helmet supposedly helped focus by rendering the wearer deaf, piping them full of oxygen, and limiting their vision to a tiny slit. (1925)

Most popular genre in Uruguay? Romance, says Scribd, with Mexico going for religion, Spain for business, Singapore for biography and history, and the US for – and I find this hard to believe when the books we see dominating charts tend to be erotica and thrillers – arts and music.